ICN Based Vehicle-to-Cloud Delivery for Multimedia Streaming in Urban Vehicular Networks

Mobile multimedia streaming is an open topic in vehicular environment. Due to the high intermittent links, it has become a critical challenge to deliver high quality video streaming in vehicular networks. In this paper, we reform the Information Centric Networking （ICN） concept for multimedia delivery in urban vehicular networks. By leveraging the 1CN perspective, we highlight that vehicular peers can obtain multimedia chunks via the vehicle-to-cloud （V2C） approach to improve the delivery quality. Based on this, we propose a lightweight multipath selection strategy to guide the network system to adaptively adjust the forwarding means. Extensive simulations show that the proposed solution can optimize the utilization of network paths, lighten network loads as well as avoid wasting resources.

Design and Implementation of an Adaptive Feedback Queue Algorithm over Open Flow Networks

The concurrent presence of different types of traffic in multimedia applications might aggravate a burden on the underlying data network, which is bound to affect the transmission quality of the specified traffic. Recently, several proposals for fulfilling the quality of service(QoS) guarantees have been presented. However, they can only support coarse-grained QoS with no guarantee of throughput, jitter, delay or loss rate for different applications. To address these more challenging problems, an adaptive scheduling algorithm for Parallel data Processing with Multiple Feedback(PPMF) queues based on software defined networks(SDN) is proposed in this paper, which can guarantee the quality of service of high priority traffic in multimedia applications. PPMF combines the queue bandwidth feedback mechanism to realise the automatic adjustment of the queue bandwidth according to the priority of the packet and network conditions, which can effectively solve the problem of network congestion that has been experienced by some queues for a long time. Experimental results show PPMF significantly outperforms other existing scheduling approaches in achieving 35--80% improvement on average time delay by adjusting the bandwidth adaptively, thus ensuring the transmission quality of the specified traffic and avoiding effectively network congestion.

Seamless handover between unicast and multicast multimedia streams

With the deployment of heterogeneous networks, mobile users are expecting ubiquitous connectivity when using applications. For bandwidth-intensive applications such as Internet Protocol Television(IPTV), multimedia contents are typically transmitted using a multicast delivery method due to its bandwidth efficiency. However, not all networks support multicasting. Multicasting alone could lead to service disruption when the users move from a multicast-capable network to a non-multicast network. In this paper, we propose a handover scheme called application layer seamless switching(ALSS) to provide smooth real-time multimedia delivery across unicast and multicast networks. ALSS adopts a soft handover to achieve seamless playback during the handover period. A real-time streaming testbed is implemented to investigate the overall handover performance, especially the overlapping period where both network interfaces are receiving audio and video packets. Both the quality of service(QoS) and objective-mapped quality of experience(QoE) metrics are measured. Experimental results show that the overlapping period takes a minimum of 56 and 4 ms for multicast-to-unicast(M2U) and unicast-to-multicast(U2M) handover, respectively. The measured peak signal-to-noise ratio(PSNR) confirms that the frame-by-frame quality of the streamed video during the handover is at least 33 dB, which is categorized as good based on ITU-T recommendations. The estimated mean opinion score(MOS) in terms of video playback smoothness is also at a satisfactory level.